Pages

Sunday, 10 December 2017

This review, originally published in Critics at Large is reproduced on this site because the On Tyranny offers helpful thoughts on how citizens can avoid crossing the line into darkness and becoming complicious with a president that has no clue that there is a line.

Historian Timothy Snyder speaking in 2016.

"Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so."

“To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.”

“Post-truth is pre-fascism.”– Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny.

Recently, I was fortunate to hear in Toronto a stimulating talk by distinguished Yale historian, Timothy Snyder, author of acclaimed monographs Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning and his latest, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Tim Duggan Books, 2017). His talk was followed by a Q&A with CBC correspondent, Susan Ormiston. It turned out that his presentation was more an expansion of the epilogue in On Tyranny that explores two paradigms leading to worldviews that founder on an insufficient knowledge of history, while the interview with Ormiston directly related to the lessons Snyder posits in that slim (a mere 126 pages) but substantive volume.

Sunday, 26 November 2017

This review that originally appeared in Critics at Large is reproduced here because the author through her central protagonist does not cross that line of darkness and descend into bigotry and xenophobia.

Author Jenny Erpenbeck.

“It is accounted a sin to turn any man away from your door.”

– Tacitus, quoted by a character inGo, Went, Gone.

As I write, German politics is on the cusp of a political crisis. Angela Merkel has provided a beacon of stability and pragmatism, if not vision and eloquence, for the last dozen years in governing the economic powerhouse of the European Community. Earlier this autumn, her centrist Christian Democrats lost sixty-five seats in the Reichstag while the extreme far-right party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), gained ninety-four seats – with thirteen percent of the vote – primarily in the former GDR. The AfD, which chillingly speaks about the Volk that evokes a dark period in German history, capitalized on voter fear of immigrants after Merkel allowed over one million migrants in 2015-16 to enter Germany, even though the people who voted for AfD were relatively untouched by the flow of refugees. Merkel’s inability so far to forge a coalition that sidelines the AfD may result in Germans heading back to the polls – perhaps giving that xenophobic, anti-Islam party more seats.

In this dispiriting time, a tonic that I would offer is the originally fresh novels of Jenny Erpenbeck,The Visitation,End of Daysand the latest in her loose trilogy, the extraordinary and timelyGo, Went, Gone(New Directions, 2017, translated by Susan Bernofsky). Erpenbeck, who was born and grew up in the former East Berlin, is attuned to the turbulence of German history in the twentieth century.The Visitationnarrates that history through the lives of the successive inhabitants of a grand house by a lake who end up being dislodged because the changing political environment renders their continued presence dangerously precarious, a novel reminiscent ofSimon Mawer’sThe Glass Room.End of Daysis a cleverly constructed novel that spans a century from Galicia at the turn of the twentieth century to the united Federal Republic of Germany that is perhaps refracted through the long life of one woman. I say “perhaps” because Erpenbeck repeatedly kills her off then revives her, the first time just after her birth by slightly changing the circumstances that led to her death, later as a desperate teenager who commits suicide, then as a middle-aged victim of a Stalinist purge.

Friday, 17 November 2017

"The greatest threat to liberal democracies does not come from immigrants and refugees but from the backlash against them by those on the inside who exploit fears of outsiders to chip away at the values and institutions that make our societies liberal."

—Sasha Polakov-Suransky, Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy, 2017

"Populists in power tend to undermine countervailing powers which are the courts, which are the media, which are other parties."

—Cas Mudde, Populism: A Very Short Introduction, 2017

"Inthe CBC
program The Fifth Estate in March, Trump is shown as a bellowing demagogue, a
purveyor of personal insults and a panderer to his supporters by reviling
Mexicans and Muslims as the racial other. The former are equated with rapists
and drug dealers, and the latter are associated with terrorists. Trump's
bumptious vitriol even suggests that the vast majority of American Muslims are
complicit to the acts perpetrated by a tiny number when he says,"they know
where the bad ones are." His simplistic solutions to these hot-button
issues are bombastic promises to build a wall to keep out the Mexicans, calling
for a ban on Muslims entering America and rounding up and deporting eleven
million undocumented immigrants. That he has retained a raucous and unthinking
cohort of loyal supporters is evidence that he has tapped into an existing
cache of psychosis and he’s exploiting it for political gain. Todd Gitlinhas
perceptively written: “the dog whistles have been superseded. What we hear now
is the raw thing itself, the old-time irreligion, the rock-bottom roar of a
sewage stream that always lay beneath the surface but now has erupted.” More
recently, Trump has tried to equate immigration in general and free trade with
fear of both homegrown terror and the new global economy. What this rank
demagogue has made unambiguously clear is that he will transgress any boundary
of decency or truth to win power."

From an essay I wrote "Through the Mirror Darkly: The Gothic Dimension of the 2016 Presidential Election

Selection from"It’s not just Trump. Authoritarian populism is rising across the West. Here’s why."

By Pippa Norris, March 11, 2016 Washington Post

We’re seeing a deep and strong a
cultural backlash against changes in social values

Here’s why. Populist authoritarianism can best be
explained as a cultural backlash in Western societies against long-term,
ongoing social change.

Over recent decades, the World Values Survey shows
that Western societies have been getting gradually more liberal on many social
issues, especially among the younger generation and well-educated middle class.
That includes egalitarian attitudes toward sex roles, tolerance of fluid gender identities and LGBT
rights, support for same-sex marriage, tolerance of diversity, and more secular values, as well as what political scientists
call emancipative values, engagement in directly assertive
forms of democratic participation, and cosmopolitan support for
agencies of global governance.

This long-term generational shift threatens many
traditionalists’ cultural values. Less educated and older citizens fear
becoming marginalized and left behind within their own countries.

In the United States, evidence from the World Values
Survey perfectly illustrates the education gap in these types of cultural
values. Well before Trump, a substantial and striking education gap can be
observed in American approval of authoritarian leaders. The WVS asked whether
Americans approved of “having a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with
congress or elections.” The figure below shows a consistent education gap and
growing support for this statement since 2005.

Most remarkably, by the most recent wave in 2011,
almost half — 44 percent — of U.S. non-college graduates approved of having a
strong leader unchecked by elections and Congress.
This deeply disturbing finding reflects attitudes
usually observed in states such as Russia.

A powerful oped in The New York Times about public ignorance that explains why a large percentage of people do have the tools to distinguish truth from falsehood.

Screenshot from Experimenter

In
1961, social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted the "obedience
experiments" at Yale University. The experiments observed the responses
of ordinary people asked to send harmful electrical shocks to a
stranger. Despite pleadings from the person they were shocking, 65
percent of subjects obeyed commands from a lab-coated authority figure
to deliver potentially fatal currents. With Adolf Eichmann's trial
airing in living rooms across America, Milgram's Kafkaesque results hit a
nerve, and he was accused of being a deceptive, manipulative monster.
EXPERIMENTER invites us inside Milgram's whirring mind, beginning with
his obedience research and wending a path to uncover how inner
obsessions and the times in which he lived shaped a parade of human
behavior inquiries.

In Could It Happen Here?,
Environics founder Michael Adams digs into this spirit of "Canadian
exceptionalism." For Adams, the election of Trump and the Britain's
shocking vote to leave the European Union aren't mere flukes of
"xenophobic populism." Rather, they constitute a "vertiginous global
reordering" unseen since the collapse of the Soviet Union. By analyzing
decades of Environics public polling and research data sets, Adams sets
out to investigate just how immunized Canadians really are from "the
malaise affecting other Western democracies." It takes him just 67
pages.

After
indexing recent instances of violent Islamophobia (such as the massacre
at a Quebec City mosque in January) and the marshalling of
anti-immigrant sentiment by Canadian politicians copping Trumpist
rhetoric (see former Conservative leadership boogeywoman Kellie Leitch),
Adams wonders if such occurrences constitute "evidence of a real shift
in social values in Canada?"

"The
answer," he says, "is 'no.' " And his data prove it. Generation after
generation, more Canadians embrace equality and immigration. Canadians
have become increasingly tolerant, not only relative to our American
neighbours but to previous Canadians. Canadians statistically prefer
compromise, where Americans err toward hardline partisanship. The
numbers show that "Canadians and their governments have managed, over a
period of decades, to prevent or mitigate the accumulation of corrosive
social forces that finally surfaced angrily in the populist politics of
the Trump/Brexit era."

For anyone who is complacent about Canada's tolerance should read oped in the Globe and Mail about the election of Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi

With shocking evidence, hilarious anecdotes, heart-wrenching
personal stories, and brilliant insights into world events, Dr. Shafique Virani
urges us to confront the Clash of Ignorance between the West and the Muslim
World, replacing walls of misinformation with bridges of understanding.
Appealing to the best in human nature, Dr. Virani presents a visionary path
forward, and inspires hope for a better future.

Thursday, 16 November 2017

"The greatest threat to liberal democracies does not come from
immigrants and refugees but from the backlash against them by those on
the inside who exploit fears of outsiders to chip away at the values and
institutions that make our societies liberal."

—Sasha Polakov-Suransky, Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy, 2017

"Populists in power tend to undermine countervailing powers which are the courts, which are the media, which are other parties."

—Cas Mudde, Populism: A Very Short Introduction, 2017

"Inthe CBC
program The Fifth Estate in March, Trump is shown as a bellowing demagogue, a
purveyor of personal insults and a panderer to his supporters by reviling
Mexicans and Muslims as the racial other. The former are equated with rapists
and drug dealers, and the latter are associated with terrorists. Trump's
bumptious vitriol even suggests that the vast majority of American Muslims are
complicit to the acts perpetrated by a tiny number when he says,"they know
where the bad ones are." His simplistic solutions to these hot-button
issues are bombastic promises to build a wall to keep out the Mexicans, calling
for a ban on Muslims entering America and rounding up and deporting eleven
million undocumented immigrants. That he has retained a raucous and unthinking
cohort of loyal supporters is evidence that he has tapped into an existing
cache of psychosis and he’s exploiting it for political gain. Todd Gitlinhas
perceptively written: “the dog whistles have been superseded. What we hear now
is the raw thing itself, the old-time irreligion, the rock-bottom roar of a
sewage stream that always lay beneath the surface but now has erupted.” More
recently, Trump has tried to equate immigration in general and free trade with
fear of both homegrown terror and the new global economy. What this rank
demagogue has made unambiguously clear is that he will transgress any boundary
of decency or truth to win power."

From an essay I wrote "Through the Mirror Darkly: The Gothic Dimension of the 2016 Presidential Election

Selection from"It’s not just Trump. Authoritarian populism is rising across the West. Here’s why."

By Pippa Norris, March 11, 2016 Washington Post

We’re seeing a deep and strong a
cultural backlash against changes in social values

Here’s why. Populist authoritarianism can best be
explained as a cultural backlash in Western societies against long-term,
ongoing social change.

Over recent decades, the World Values Survey shows
that Western societies have been getting gradually more liberal on many social
issues, especially among the younger generation and well-educated middle class.
That includes egalitarian attitudes toward sex roles, tolerance of fluid gender identities and LGBT
rights, support for same-sex marriage, tolerance of diversity, and more secular values, as well as what political scientists
call emancipative values, engagement in directly assertive
forms of democratic participation, and cosmopolitan support for
agencies of global governance.

This long-term generational shift threatens many
traditionalists’ cultural values. Less educated and older citizens fear
becoming marginalized and left behind within their own countries.

In the United States, evidence from the World Values
Survey perfectly illustrates the education gap in these types of cultural
values. Well before Trump, a substantial and striking education gap can be
observed in American approval of authoritarian leaders. The WVS asked whether
Americans approved of “having a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with
congress or elections.” The figure below shows a consistent education gap and
growing support for this statement since 2005.

Most remarkably, by the most recent wave in 2011,
almost half — 44 percent — of U.S. non-college graduates approved of having a
strong leader unchecked by elections and Congress.
This deeply disturbing finding reflects attitudes
usually observed in states such as Russia.

Screenshot from Experimenter

In
1961, social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted the "obedience
experiments" at Yale University. The experiments observed the responses
of ordinary people asked to send harmful electrical shocks to a
stranger. Despite pleadings from the person they were shocking, 65
percent of subjects obeyed commands from a lab-coated authority figure
to deliver potentially fatal currents. With Adolf Eichmann's trial
airing in living rooms across America, Milgram's Kafkaesque results hit a
nerve, and he was accused of being a deceptive, manipulative monster.
EXPERIMENTER invites us inside Milgram's whirring mind, beginning with
his obedience research and wending a path to uncover how inner
obsessions and the times in which he lived shaped a parade of human
behavior inquiries.

In Could It Happen Here?,
Environics founder Michael Adams digs into this spirit of "Canadian
exceptionalism." For Adams, the election of Trump and the Britain's
shocking vote to leave the European Union aren't mere flukes of
"xenophobic populism." Rather, they constitute a "vertiginous global
reordering" unseen since the collapse of the Soviet Union. By analyzing
decades of Environics public polling and research data sets, Adams sets
out to investigate just how immunized Canadians really are from "the
malaise affecting other Western democracies." It takes him just 67
pages.

After
indexing recent instances of violent Islamophobia (such as the massacre
at a Quebec City mosque in January) and the marshalling of
anti-immigrant sentiment by Canadian politicians copping Trumpist
rhetoric (see former Conservative leadership boogeywoman Kellie Leitch),
Adams wonders if such occurrences constitute "evidence of a real shift
in social values in Canada?"

"The
answer," he says, "is 'no.' " And his data prove it. Generation after
generation, more Canadians embrace equality and immigration. Canadians
have become increasingly tolerant, not only relative to our American
neighbours but to previous Canadians. Canadians statistically prefer
compromise, where Americans err toward hardline partisanship. The
numbers show that "Canadians and their governments have managed, over a
period of decades, to prevent or mitigate the accumulation of corrosive
social forces that finally surfaced angrily in the populist politics of
the Trump/Brexit era."

For anyone who is complacent about Canada's tolerance should read oped in the Globe and Mail about the election of Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi

With shocking evidence, hilarious anecdotes, heart-wrenching
personal stories, and brilliant insights into world events, Dr. Shafique Virani
urges us to confront the Clash of Ignorance between the West and the Muslim
World, replacing walls of misinformation with bridges of understanding.
Appealing to the best in human nature, Dr. Virani presents a visionary path
forward, and inspires hope for a better future.

Sunday, 12 November 2017

This review that originally appeared in Critics at Large is reproduced on this site because Ta-Nehisi Coates' We Were Eight Years in Power explores how the ideology of white supremacy expressed itself during the Obama years and the election of Donald Trump

Author Ta-Nehisi Coates. (Photo: Stephen Voss)

“We were eight years in power. We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb, rebuilt the ferries. In short, we had reconstructed the State and placed it upon the road to prosperity.”

– Thomas Miller, South Carolina Congressman, 1895.

“The beauty in his (Baldwin’s) writing wasn’t just style or ornament but an unparalleled ability to see what was before him clearly and then lay that vision, with that same clarity, before the world.”

– Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power.

The Congressman quoted in the first epigraph was an African-American who in a futile effort was attempting to make the case that blacks in the legislature had provided competent government so why should whites attempt to disenfranchise blacks with poll taxes and literacy tests. It was not necessary for him to add the terrorist attacks from the Klan against blacks who attempted to vote. A few years later the civil rights icon, W.E.B. Du Bois, offered an insightful response: “If there was one thing that South Carolina feared more than bad Negro government, it was good Negro government.’’ These two quotations provide the title and the thesis of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest offering, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy(One World, 2017). The good government that Obama provided generated a racist backlash in whichDonald Trumpwas the major beneficiary. Coates’s book is structured around eight essays, one for each year ofthe Obama presidencywritten originally forThe Atlantic, for which he is a national correspondent, and concludes with a blistering epilogue on the white supremacist ideology of Trump in all its “truculent and sanctimonious power.”

American suffragist Alice Paul (1885-1977) was born into a prominent Quaker family in New Jersey. While attending a training school in England, she became active with the country’s radical suffragists. After two years with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), she cofounded the Congressional Union and then formed the National Woman’s party in 1916. Drawing on her experience, Paul led demonstrations and was subjected to imprisonment as she sought a voting amendment, but her actions helped bring about the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Paul continued to push for equal rights and worked from National Woman’s party headquarters in Washington, D.C., until her later years.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt’s legacy stands on two pillars. She was an unabashed feminist, refusing to be silenced in the traditionally male world of politics. And she became a symbol of what caring for the downtrodden in society — including the poor, minorities, women, youth, and refugees — should look like. Through these two pillars, Eleanor transformed the role of the First Lady from ornamental to activist....

Eleanor
faced a lot of public backlash during her time as First Lady. When she
wrote magazinearticles
and expressed her opinions, she was likely to cause uproar. The Los
Angeles Times newspaper called for her to be forced to retire from public life,
because of her public criticism of the discrimination that Japanese Americans
were facing. She was outspoken on the issue of racial discrimination and
declared her support for civil rights. She invited hundreds of African
American guests to the White House during her time as First Lady — another
controversial move at the time. Her stance on racial discrimination
created angry ripples across the country, especially in the South. But the
critics never deterred her. Eleanor Roosevelt spoke out for
those whom society cared less about at a time when women were not supposed to
be speaking out at all.

LATER LIFE AND LEGACY

Franklin
D. Roosevelt died in 1945, and his successor, President Harry S. Truman,
appointed Eleanor Roosevelt as a delegate to the United Nations General
Assembly. She became the first chairperson for the
United Nations Commission on Human Rights and played a key role in helping to
form the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Against a backdrop of sex, politics and race, Academy Award winning filmmaker Freida

Mock's Anita reveals
the intimate story of Anita Hill, a woman who dared to speak the truth.
This powerful documentary traces Ms. Hill's life from her early years
through her legacy today, offering fascinating insight into her
experiences testifying before the Senate just over 22 years ago in the
weekend of shocking television that made her a household name and
smashed the door open on the issues of sexualharassment and gender equality.

Anita Hill

The New Yorker asked Anita Hill what has changed since she contended in 1991 that Clarence Thomas was not fit be a Supreme Court judge because he sexually harassed her.

Read a shocking article in The New Yorker about how Harvey Weinstein used private security agencies to discredit the women who accused him of sexual improprieties and to ensure their stories never became public. Individuals posing as journalists or human rights activists for women sought to gather information on these women

I recommend two pieces a strong op ed in The New York Times on the culture of complicity and a historical profile of sexual harassment from The Times

“In 1991, I
testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Clarence Thomas, who had repeatedly
harassed me when he was my boss, was unsuitable to sit on the U.S. Supreme
Court,” said Hill. “The outcome of my testimony was not what I’d hoped, but in
no way was it the final word. In the five years after I testified, sexual harassment
complaints filed with the EEOC more than doubled. Legislation against
harassment slowly but surely began to pass. And I saw that we had a chance to
shift this narrative.”

Maya Angelou at President Clinton's Inaugural

The film Maya Angelou and Still I Rise from co-directors Bob Hercules and Rita Coburn Whack does have the credit of being the first documentary made about Angelou's life. That sounds hard to believe at first, given Angelou's popularity and importance to American art, but also makes more sense when one considers that she also wrote seven autobiographies, along with numerous amounts of personal pieces. The film seeks to become the ultimate biography, while offering Angelou on camera, sharing her side of life stories that have become American lore in books like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Told in mostly chronological order, the documentary touches upon many chapters of Angelou’s life, starting with her upbringing in Stamps, Arkansas. While painting a picture of her upbringing in a poor, racist part of the country, it focuses on the growth of her voice, particularly when she was mute for a long time after a traumatic event. As a clue to her later brilliance without intense schooling, Angelou shares how she memorized full Shakespeare plays and read everything she could get her hands on during her formative years of silence. But as she says herself, “When I decided to speak, I had a lot to say.”

As the documentary charts the course of how her creative voice blossomed across mediums, Angelou is a fascinating open book, with her perspective coming in between smiles during a talking head interview. In an incredible journey, she started as a dancer then singer (known as Miss Calypso), and then went onto write songs and short stories, before getting to personally know the like of Langston Hughes or James Baldwin. She established an importance that spread to other areas, like political activism, which led her to friendships with Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, among many others. “Maya Angelou and Still I Rise” provides an in-depth picture of how prolific she was, the connections that led from one artistic opportunity to the next, and strong examples of how those she interacted with influenced her work. Hercules & Coburn’s film celebrates the importance of others on our creativity, and with a brilliant example; a woman who gave back a voice to numerous communities, while helping the life of a black woman become more visible on a cultural scale.

What the documentary adds to the Maya Angelou legacy can be found in various little gems, as it covers nearly every major form of artistry that she tackled, including songwriting (with Quincy Jones) and directing (the 1998 film “Down in the Delta”). Its talking head interviews are in particular a great find, including some beautiful words by Alfre Woodard and Cicely Tyson, or figures like President Bill Clinton, who speaks about why he chose her to write a poem (On the Pulse of Morning) for his presidential inauguration, which hadn’t happened since Robert Frost: “I knew she would make an impression. She was big and had the voice of God.”

"Ask
social scientists how to end global poverty, and they will tell you:
Educate girls. Capture them in that fleeting window between the ages of
10 and 14, give them an education, and watch a community change: Per
capita income goes up, infant mortality goes down, the rate of economic
growth increases, the rate of HIV/AIDS infection falls. Child marriage
becomes less common, as does child labor. Educated mothers tend to
educate their children. They tend to be more frugal with family money.
Last year, the World Bank reckoned that Kenya’s illiterate girls, if
educated, could boost that country’s economy by $27 billion in the
course of a lifetime.

Whether
an emerging nation likes it or not, its girls are its greatest
resource. Educating them, as economist Lawrence Summers once said, “may
be the single highest-return investment available in the developing
world.”

Nowhere
is that lesson more evident than in the story of Malala Yousafzai, a
Pashtun girl from Pakistan’s Swat Valley who was born of an illiterate
mother, grew up in her father’s school, read Stephen Hawking’sA Brief History of Timeby
age 11 and has a gift for stirring oratory. And nowhere did that lesson
go more rebuffed than in the verdant Swat Valley, where hard-line
jihadists swept out of the mountains, terrorized villages and
radicalized boys, and where—one muggy day last October—a Taliban fighter
leapt onto a school bus, shouted, “Who is Malala?” and shot her
point-blank in the head for speaking out about her God-given right to
attend school.

Malala tells of that life-shattering moment in a
riveting memoir, I Am Malala...a book that should be read not only for its
vivid drama but for its urgent message about the untapped power of girls.

The story begins with Malala’s father, Ziauddin
Yousafzai, the son of an imam (a preacher of Islam), who was instilled from
boyhood with a deep love of learning, an unwavering sense of justice and a
commitment to speak out in defense of both. Like Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the
founder of Pakistan, Ziauddin was convinced that aside from the sword and the
pen, there is an even greater power—that of women — and so, when his
firstborn turned out to be a bright, inquisitive daughter, he raised her with
all the attention he lavished on his sons...."

Thursday, 9 November 2017

“We just need to open our
eyes, and our ears, and our hearts to know that this nation’s racial history
still casts its long shadow upon us.”
—Barack Obama speaking in Selma on March, 7th 2015 at the fifth anniversary of
the famous march

Now that Chris and his girlfriend, Rose, have reached
the meet-the-parents milestone of dating, she invites him for a weekend getaway
upstate with Missy and Dean. At first, Chris reads the family's overly
accommodating behavior as nervous attempts to deal with their daughter's
interracial relationship, but as the weekend progresses, a series of
increasingly disturbing discoveries lead him to a truth that he could have
never imagined.

In 1932 Macon County, Alabama, the federal
government launched into a medical study called The Tuskegee Study of Untreated
Blacks with Syphilis. The study selected 412 men infected with the disease and
faked long term treatment, while really only giving them placebos and
liniments. The premise of the action was to determine if blacks reacted similar
to whites to the overall effects of the disease. The experiment was only
discontinued 40 years later when a Senate investigation was initiated. At that
time, only 127 of the original study group were left alive. The story is told
from the point of view of Nurse Eunice Evers, who was well aware of the lack of
treatment being offered, but felt her role was to console the involved men,
many of whom were her direct friends. In fact, the movie's name comes from the
fact that a performing dancer and three musicians named their act for her -
"Miss Evers' Boys". All had the disease. A romance with one goes
unrequited even after he joins the Army.

James Baldwin

In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a
letter to his literary agent describing his next project, Remember This House.
The book was to be a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and
successive assassinations of three of his close friends-Medgar Evers, Malcolm X
and Martin Luther King, Jr. At the time of Baldwin's death in 1987, he left
behind only thirty completed pages of his manuscript. Now, in his incendiary
new documentary, master filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin
never finished. The result is a radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race
in America, using Baldwin's original words and flood of rich archival material.
I Am Not Your Negro is a journey into black history that connects the past of
the Civil Rights movement to the present of #BlackLivesMatter. It is a film
that questions black representation in Hollywood and beyond. And, ultimately,
by confronting the deeper connections between the lives and assassination of
these three leaders, Baldwin and Peck have produced a work that challenges the
very definition of what America stands for.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Trump truly is something new – the
first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And
so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who
rose to become President. He must be called by his correct name and rightly
honorific – America’s first white president.”

“Every
Trump voter is most certainly not a white supremacist,” But every
Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.”

— Ta–Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, 2017For a powerful review in The New York Times of We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton from Loving

The
interracial couple Richard and Mildred Loving fell in love and were
married in 1958. They grew up in Central Point, a small town in Virginia
that was more integrated than surrounding areas in the American South.
Yet it was the state of Virginia, where they were making their home and
starting a family,
that first jailed and then banished them. Richard and Mildred relocated
with their children to the inner city of Washington, D.C., but the
family ultimately tries to find a way back to Virginia.

Against a backdrop of sex, politics and race, Academy Award winning filmmaker Freida

Mock's Anita reveals
the intimate story of Anita Hill, a woman who dared to speak the truth.
This powerful documentary traces Ms. Hill's life from her early years
through her legacy today, offering fascinating insight into her
experiences testifying before the Senate just over 22 years ago in the
weekend of shocking television that made her a household name and
smashed the door open on the issues of sexualharassment and gender equality.

Anita Hill

The New Yorker
asked Anita Hill what has changed since she contended in 1991 that
Clarence Thomas was not fit be a Supreme Court judge because he sexually
harassed her.

Read a shocking article in The New Yorker about
how Harvey Weinstein used private security agencies to discredit the
women who accused him of sexual improprieties and to ensure their
stories never became public. Individuals posing as journalists or human
rights activists for women sought to gather information on these women that could be used against them.

Hadiya Roderique

"Nowadays
in Canada, overt acts of racism are rare. Instead, the subtle ones tire
you out and wear your sense of belonging. They happen more often, more
insidiously. These acts of discrimination can be more detrimental than
blatant racism or sexism. It's easier to point out prejudice when
someone is overtly racist. Organizations have policies and procedures
for reporting explicit racism and sexism. Others, hearing your story,
are suitably outraged. But the underground cracks, passive-aggressive
dismissals, the ghostly put downs, are harder to mark."

That Line of Darkness: Vol. 2

That Line of Darkness: Vol. 1

About Me

Author of That Line of Darkness: The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War, Encompass Editions (2012) and second volume, That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden, Encompass Editions (2013).